Was what's running approved?

Most Anaplan landscapes can answer that question with confidence. Far fewer can answer it with evidence. The distance between those two positions is small in ordinary operation and large during an audit.

Eleven pagesSpecific to AnaplanNo form, no email required

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What is in it

01The control exists. It is executed by people.Every Anaplan change follows a process. It is also manual, and manual controls have known weaknesses and a measurable cost

02A log is not a governance reportWhat a governance report requires that a log does not, and why the record that answers it has to be retained before the change is made.

03The promotion mechanism is model-scopedWhat ALM does reliably, where its scope ends, and what sits above it that changes without moving through it.

04Three statesAuthorization attached to the change. Nothing reaching production outside the path. What was approved is what is running. Each stated as a condition you can test.

05Where these functions have settled elsewhereThirty years of conventional software practice put authorization, promotion, access restriction, and state comparison outside the application. Why that happened, and why it holds here.

06What changesGovernance costs less effort when the second pass disappears, and the return arrives long before any auditor does.

07Was what's running approved?The question an auditor asks once a year, and the one a user asks when a page looks different from last week.

Both records do what they were built to do. Neither is built to hold evidence across an audit period.

Model change history is retained by the platform as a permanent record, and it is reviewed in the interface. The Audit API, which is what an external system can read, carries recent activity. An audit conducted in March may examine changes made in the previous fiscal year, so whether that evidence can be produced depends on whether something outside the platform was retaining it at the time the change was made.

Section 02.

Who it is for

The platform lead

What ALM does reliably, where its scope ends, and what sits above the model and changes where it runs. Read Section 03 first.

The audit and IT executive

The cost of the manual control, and three conditions an assertion about change can be tested against. Sections 01 and 04.

The partner or platform vendor

Why the authority layer sits outside the platform being governed, and why that is complementary rather than competitive. Section 05.

Read it, or talk it through

No form and no email address. If the argument holds for your landscape, the next useful thing is a conversation about what it would take to answer the question with evidence.

Read the paper Book time with George Mulling